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THE JIM PARABLE
By Ringcaat
Before reading this story, please adjust the contrast on your monitor until the following letter looks like a vowel:
d
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CHAPTER 1: The Premise Chapter.
THIS IS THE STORY of a man named Jim.
Jim (whose last name was definitively not important) had once worked in an office building for just a titch over two months, shortly out of college. He had been employed as a purchaser for a mid-sized construction company, in which capacity his duties were to track inventory, negotiate deals on a bulk scale, and generally help to smooth over any problems he might encounter in the corporate supply chain. Jim had not been doing this for long before he realized that he would never enjoy this job and would moreover never become good at it... at which point he put out feelers and wound up instead as a superintendent for a small Bauhaus-style low-rise apartment complex. While this position did not bring Jim satisfaction, it was at least preferable to freelance handyman work and left him plenty of time for shooting the breeze with friends, which resulted one day in his attending a VR party which prominently featured the Crows, Crows, Crows game Accounting+. Jim threw himself wholeheartedly into this game, manufactured reasons to come over again to his friend's place and play through it more thoroughly, and subsequently became a devoted fan of all things Crows Crows Crows.
He enjoyed The Stanley Parable. Oh, sure, it struck him as a little self-absorbed, a little over the top in its pontification, but good silly fun just the same. In some ways, Jim reflected, it was perhaps a little too silly. Stanley's entire job was just to push given buttons on a keyboard when the computer told him to? Wouldn't it be much simpler for the computer simply to input these keystrokes itself? Jim didn't know a lot about computers, but he was pretty sure there was no particular need for a computer to even simulate the pressing of its own buttons, and he remembered enough about his unpleasant office job to know Stanley's job was a far cry from what one would actually do in an office. Wouldn't the player's subversion of the 'true' story in The Stanley Parable be more effective, more stinging, if the initial setup were less absurd to begin with? If you start with a cartoon, can you really be surprised if your content turns out to be cartoons all the way down?
And yet, despite these personal misgivings, when the expanded Ultra Deluxe version was announced in 2018, there was really no question: Jim would buy it, enjoy it, and discuss it with his friends, or at least those who also played offbeat avant-garde computer games. The ensuing delays only heightened his anticipation, and by the time the game eventually hit Steam in 2022, he was all fired up; Jim set aside an entire weekend to dive in. He supplied himself with beer and chimichangas, closed the curtains and lowered the lights, and got to work immersing himself once more in the world of Stanley the hapless office worker—a drone if ever there was one—and the world surrounding him that seemed determined, at all costs, to make him the hero of some kind of story.
An hour and a half in, Jim discovered the New Content door. Forty-five minutes after that, he was wandering the exposition hall of The Stanley Parable 2. The narrator introduced him to the button that says your name when you push it; he pushed it. "JIM," it said. Jim, whose auburn beard still harbored beads of his Indian pale ale, laughed aloud. Oh, that was nice. It was just coincidence, wasn't it? Jim was a common name. The game hadn't... read his name off his operating system info or anything like that, had it? Could computer games even do that? He seemed to recall they could—some famous horror game had made a splash by doing something like that, even if it was a rare tactic.
He listened as the narrator described a man not too different from himself... though Jim hadn't played frisbee in years and wouldn't have described the church help he'd received in the course of his journey to quit smoking as 'fringe', really. No, this wasn't him the game was describing, but still... he was affected by the coincidence, and wanted to confirm that it really was one, or if perhaps some trace of his name on the PC had been tapped and fed through text-to-voice for the game. Well, probably not, he realized. The button itself could say other people's names on other systems, but the narrator? He had also said "Jim" several times, and Jim wasn't sure it would be possible to make a computer mimic this voice actor's exact voice. No, almost certainly it was just the name they'd thought was funniest in that particular spot.
But it niggled at him. An hour later, after finishing the expo, Jim alt-tabbed out of The Stanley Parable and searched the web for info about the Button That Says the Name of the Person Who Is Playing the Game.
"The Freemont Button," read the title of one video.
"Couldn't resist hitting the button that says Freemont before the narrator was done talking," said one forum user.
"The button that says the name of the person who is playing the game," said the semi-official wiki, "is an exhibit in the Expo Room. The Narrator claims that in the completed game it will in fact state the player's actual name; however, in the current state of the feature, the button only says 'Freemont'."
What. No. What? Jim searched the web a while longer, then called his friend who'd played the game the day before. "You know the button in the big expo room, the one that says your name?"
"The button that says Freemont? Yeah, what about it?"
Jim could only pause to swallow. "In my copy of the game, it says 'Jim'."
"Whoa. Really? Are you kidding?"
He wasn't kidding. His friend could come up with no explanation except that perhaps, just maybe, one of Jim's other friends had hacked into his computer and installed a modified version of TSPUD as an elaborate prank. There were a trove of discarded buttons later in the game, Jim's friend told him, that also said "Freemont." Had Jim found those yet?
He had not. So he played on until he reached the Epilogue, in which he found that the discarded buttons also, in fact, said "Jim" (except for one that said "Stanley.") He then researched how to access the source code of his particular copy of the game. Jim found, after a great deal of work, a variable that pointed to the audio clip played when the button was pressed. The variable was set to a file called " ."
Four hours later, Jim was in bed, sleeping listlessly. He had fallen asleep with vague ideas as to an explanation, but these were increasingly half-formed and implausible. His dreams were his own, unknowable to us, but we can conjecture that they were unsettled. What we do know is that when Jim awoke, at an hour somewhat later than his accustomed one, he was at first unsure that he had fully awakened, although, in fact, he had. The reason for this confusion was simple: Jim had begun to become aware of the narrator.
"Um," mumbled Jim, as of yet still drowsy. "Who's there?"
But there was no one there. Not in the classical sense of 'there', anyway. There was only Jim—a single man who had often told himself he was content being single, for this phase of his life, at any rate. He had no one to caress or warm him beneath the sheets, and no one to wake to. Jim was alone.
"God, what? Holy hell, who is THERE?!" he yelled, tearing off his blanket and pulling himself out of bed. Jim had yet to realize that there was, in fact, nobody there; what he was hearing was not an actual voice. It had no sonic signature, it displaced no air; it commanded not a single decibel.
"Are you... is someone fucking with me!?"
But, as we have previously covered, there was no one, in fact, fucking with Jim. Perhaps if there had been someone in his life to fill that role, he would not have been allowed to reach the unfortunate point at which he now found himself.
"Who's there," he said, more weakly this time as he paced the length of his superintendent's apartment. "It's not coming from any one damn place..."
This observation did not, however, keep Jim from tearing cushions from couches, checking both his landline and cell phone, and flicking his home entertainment system on and off. Apparently Jim did not trust the evidence of his own ears. Or rather, the lack of evidence, as what he was experiencing, while soundlike in the nature of its verbiage and cadence, was in actuality a fully non-aural phenomenon.
"Are you the narrator? Are you narrating my fucking life?"
Ah. Jim had finally, it seemed, managed to grasp a basic element of that which was transpiring. He was, in fact, hearing the voice of a narrator, and that narrator was, in fact, narrating his life at that very moment. However, he was mistaken in one particular: it was not the narrator speaking, as if there were only one such individual in all of existence, heavens no; rather, it was a narrator.
"Whatever. Are you the same narrator as in the game?" he asked.
Jim had failed to specify what game he meant, yet the identity of this game was in no way ambiguous. The narrator he was hearing was not, in fact, the same one as in the game he had been playing all the previous day—that is, when he hadn't been attempting to deconstruct its source code or frantically researching it on the internet. It would be tempting to say it was an entirely different sort of narrator, engaging in an entirely different sort of narration, but this would not be true; the two narrators were, in truth, cut from rather the same cloth. They fulfilled the same function; they even spoke with a similar accent and in a similar idiolect.
"Oh my god," said Jim, tearing about without an object. Then he began to get dressed, still exclaiming "Oh my god."
Jim eventually managed to escape his apartment. If he was trying to escape the flow of narration of his life, however, this is something he was quite unable to do. None of us are able to escape the narration of our lives, you see. It is a constant undertaking nearly synonymous with the living of life itself, after all. To exist is to be narrated, to be narrated is to exist. It is simply that most of us, at most times in our lives, are blissfully unaware of our own narration. But it is happening at all times nonetheless.
"You're crazy," said Jim quietly as he drove from his complex's modest parking lot onto a moderately busy street and sped for the wide open uncultivated spaces between his town and the next. "You're crazy. Not everyone gets narrated. Who would even do the narration? Who the fuck ARE you?!"
The answer to his question, of course, is that narrators would, and do, do the narration. And since narrators exist, it follows that they, too, have their existences narrated. They are not typically privy to the details of this narration, but as narrators themselves, they are quite aware that it exists. Who narrates the narrators? Why, narrator-narrators, of course. And so on.
"Was I drunk last night? No. No I was fucking not drunk. I was researching the game. Trying to figure out why my copy had the button that said my name and nobody else in the world had a button that fucking said 'Jim'."
Although Jim was by now well out of town, he could still hear the narrator describing his actions and experiences. This continued to be true even after he parked the car and bolted from it into a featureless field of tall grass. The narrator that had, it must be stressed, always been narrating his life, even from his very embryonic genesis, could still be apprehended, clear as day, down to the very word.
"Okay," Jim huffed, already out of breath despite having run a mere twenty paces through the grass. This, let it be noted, is what heavy smoking will do to a person. "No, it's not that I fucking used to smoke," Jim burst out. "I'm scared! I'm god damned scared of whoever the fuck you are. Who ARE you?"
To ask direct questions of one's narrator is rarely wise and even more rarely effective. Jim had not yet realized that a narrator does not hold a conversation; he does not ask or answer questions, nor engage in discussion or argument. A narrator simply narrates, along with the occasional explanatory contextual note in order to make the narrative more clear.
"Okay, no, bullshit," said Jim. "The narrator in the game talks to Stanley."
This was true. The narrator in The Stanley Parable did talk to Stanley, at times; he also, at other times, spoke directly to the player. This deviation from convention can be explained as artistic license; The Stanley Parable, after all, was merely a work of fiction. The game's writers had postulated a less than fully professional narrator—one that broke from duty and 'character' now and then, in the interest of contributing to the entertainment value of their computer game. Such a narrator was in some ways unrealistic, but it was still a remarkably, remarkably close depiction of reality, in that most games did not have narrators at all, and those that did tended to use them only as framing devices for the stories they told, as if they were themselves characters within the universe of the tale, albeit usually outside of the immediate sphere of the events they recollected. The Stanley Parable's narrator was not a person within the office-centric world of The Stanley Parable; he was a being outside of that world, yet still within the game itself, and it was in this authenticity that lay The Stanley Parable's unparalleled genius.
"Will you please. Shut the Fuck. Up!"
Jim's words were unheeded. A being that was not actually talking, in the classical sense of creating sound, could not possibly shut up. And a being whose only existence lay in the narration of a man's story could hardly shut up either, lest both narrator and man cease to exist. A narrator shut up is no narrator at all, nor indeed anything. To tell a narrator to shut up is to demand suicide.
"Is there... well, okay," stammered Jim. "While I'm talking, at least you aren't saying anything. That's something."
That was, it might be admitted, something. And yet, even that observation was conditional and contextual in nature. The next time Jim spoke, he might well be surprised.
"What," began Jim, "do," he continued, "you," he went on, "mean?" concluded Jim, his rather short demand for an explanation complete. But he had more to utter. "Oh," he then resumed saying, "for," he went on to pronounce, "God's," he proceeded to take his Lord's name in vain, "sake!" he swore, frustrated beyond belief at how much he believed he had just heard in the space of two brief four-word sentences. He did not even know how he had absorbed and understood so much interstitial speech in the space of those brief utterances—surely there wasn't time for so much meaning to wedge itself in between any given two words a person might say, was there? This was worse even than hearing voices. This voice did not work at the pace of speech; it was more fundamental, more insidious, and yet at the same time, more necessary.
"Please," begged Jim. "What do you want? What can I do?" The morning was cloudy and the breeze cool. Traces of dew still clung to the tall grass, moistening Jim's bare calves, as he had selected short pants in his hurry to dress. Had he really believed that leaving the vicinity of his home and town, with all its technology and nearby people, would alleviate the need for his life to be narrated? Did he really think that narration was just an artifact of civilization?
Jim cried. He fell to his knees and cried in the vast field of grass. He clenched his face and rubbed his eyes with his pudgy hands. He tried to think of something pleasant, and while it is possible that he succeeded, it was certainly not enough to counteract the terrifying sensation of hearing his own narrator speak.
"Was it the game that started this?" he asked, his voice small and broken. He knew it must have been—this could not have been a coincidence. Was it the button saying his name that had sparked Jim's awareness of his own narration, or had that merely been a foreshadowing, a portent of the event to come? Or, had the button perhaps been nothing more than his own narrator electing to tease him? Was this all, in fact, the narrator's fault?
Of course, it was not. It was the fault of those incorrigible rascals at Crows Crows Crows, naturally! They were the creators of the vexatious game, were they not? As such, they were squarely to blame. As if a narrator could ever be the one at fault for ruining a man's life! A narrator, after all, is merely a storyteller—a relater of facts as they occur. A narrator does not make things true as he says them, regardless of what certain portions of The Stanley Parable might imply. He is no god. He is merely an individual capable of describing events as he sees fit: this is the sole encompassment of his abilities. How could any misfortune, however slight, possibly be the narrator's fault?
Then again, there was certainly power in words, as the fact that Jim was currently quailing with his eyes shut in a field under nothing more than an onslaught of words could potently attest. And the button in the game had, essentially, been nothing more than a vehicle for the delivery of a single word. A word that, despite its singularity, had sent Jim into a fearful panic for hours the previous day. One of the more powerful words available—his own name. But still, just a little word. Three mere letters, three slim sounds. There was almost nothing to it at all.
"How can I make this stop?" he asked. "Maybe you are always fucking constantly narrating my life. But I didn't use to hear it. Can you make it so I don't hear you anymore?"
Again, Jim had made the mistake of attributing power to the narrator, of presuming to bargain with him directly. Yet there was, potentially, a way. It would appear that Jim had been identified more positively than anyone as the person playing the game known as The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. Not just the gamer operating it from afield with a sophisticated keyboard or console, but the man actually playing the game: the one it was about. Jim was the new Stanley, so it seemed. Indeed, there was no other explanation. Perhaps a certain narrator, one who had always possessed that special and ancient connection to Jim, had witnessed, indeed, told of Jim playing this entertaining computer game and had decided to let himself... be inspired by it. To indulge in a little postmodern self-reference, just for kicks and giggles. Perhaps Jim now found himself in the very same role that Stanley occupied in the game. And perhaps, just as Stanley had found happiness and freedom in the prescribed mainline ending, so might Jim attain freedom similarly... by simply making the right choices.
"What choices?" he asked. "What are my choices? Are you saying this will end, if I do what you say?"
To do what a narrator says—what an idea! A perfect paradox, nearly. What one does, by definition, a narrator narrates, or says; therefore, a narrator says exactly those things one does; ergo, one does exactly what a narrator says. But the causality! The technical truth of the statement belies the fact that the causality simply doesn't run that way!
"I don't think I'm crazy," said Jim, who was definitively not crazy. "Okay. But this doesn't happen. This does not happen."
As a matter of practice, he was correct. The opening of one's mind to one's narrator does not, as a general occurrence, happen. It is not a rule of nature, nor a regular phenomenon. It was happening here and now, but the phrase 'This does not happen' did not preclude a singular instantiation.
Jim was walking back to his car, his countenance a strange admixture of grim and sad. He opened the car door and stood beside it. "What do I have to do?" he asked the very air. "What choices do I have to make? Do I have to choose a left door instead of a right one?"
There was no one to answer his questions. Yet Jim knew that his idea, trivial though it was, was a good one. The choice of one door over another did indeed seem to perfectly convey the metaphor of choice for choice's sake; did one not speak, for example, of 'doors opening' in reference to opportunities emerging? Does not one door open when another closes? The act of passing through a door resembled entering a new plane of possibilities, and as such it would make for an excellent basic element in a playing field of potential choices. And as for left and right, what choice could possibly be more arbitrary than that? Why, there was nothing to distinguish left from right except for the leftness or rightness of objects themselves! It was the very soul of an arbitrary choice, the purpose of which was to do nothing more nor less than declare one's allegiance to propriety: with or against. To do the proper thing or the wrong thing; to conform, or to rebel! What better representation of this vital dichotomy than a pair of doors, one to the left, one to the right, exactly one of which a person must open and pass through? The notion might be cliched by now, perhaps a bit hoary, but it was a good model, a weighty and yet easy one, and one not yet drained of its innately beautiful aesthetic.
"So... I should... find a pair of doors?" asked Jim, a bit confused.
Yes, find some doors, Jim, post haste! No, no, of course that would not be enough. Jim would have to do more than just locate a pair of doors. No—he would have to drive to the nearest abandoned office building.
A/N: What's this? Is this a place for the author to explain his reasoning in having begun to create such an audacious work of genius as the present selection? Well, how clever! What a lovely little idea, this "Author's Notes section." Surely the author has oodles of insights into the creative process, and will presently begin delineating precisely what metaphorical stroke of lightning from his life inspired him to compose this, the first chapter in what will soon be his greatest magnum opus to date, in a fanfiction career practically studded with magnum opera: The Jim Parable.
Wait. What's that? You just wanted to write a fan fiction story about a work that was actually new, for once? Because your ill-timed offerings to date simply weren't getting enough views and comments?
You do realize The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, on top of being an extension of a pre-existing game, was released in April, don't you? And it's now July?
Well. Best of luck with that, author. You are truly the early bird.
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